MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: 'Have you heard about the dictionary for masochists?" one character asks another in one of the few conversations within the oblique You Are Here. 'It has all the words in it. They’re just not in any particular order." At first glance the same might be said of experimental filmmaker and video installation artist Daniel Cockburn’s debut feature: it has all the elements of a movie, they’re just not cut together in any particular order.
Made with an obvious appreciation for post-narrative literature, from the interlocking spaces of Jorge Luis Borges through to the inexplicable procedures of David Foster Wallace, the low-budget Canadian film is a labyrinthine puzzle – although the creator is not too bothered with either the establishment of clues or the provision of answers; Darren Aronofsky’s Pi is a Kate Hudson romantic comedy compared to You Are Here.
Calling to mind, in it spare release of information and involved underlying structure, Peter Greenaway’s 1980 debut The Falls, Cockburn’s feature turns on lectures, reports and investigation, played deadpan straight with the emotional punctuation coming from the subterranean wheezes and industrial flecks of Rick Hyslop’s score. It starts slowly, but does offer links as it progresses.
The first sequence, a grainily recorded presentation from The Lecturer (R.D. Reid) about the nature of consciousness and understanding, turns out to one of the numerous pieces of samizdat that present themselves on a daily frequency to The Archivist (Tracy Wright), an obsessive cataloguer of these various offerings that she finds in envelopes and tin cans, on footpaths and in doorways. They could be a trail, except that for all her attempts to project reason on them via detail the archive defies her, leaving her to talk of it as if it is alive and aggrieved.
That’s a recurring element: people are tiny cogs in these strange, otherworldly constructions they can barely recognise, let alone comprehend, while the procedures take on a life (and personality) of their own. The story of The Inventor (Peter Solala), told by a child to render it fable-like, is that of an artificial eye that comes to control those who use it, while one character, Alan, is a literal everyman who is played in bursts of a few seconds long by dozens of different people as his consciousness flits from one body to the next.
Cockburn uses static set-ups and sombre puzzlement to create the atmosphere, switching between shooting formats as abruptly as the narrative changes focus. The dry tone, with nods to bureaucratese and scientific detachment, does house a sly strand of black humour, whether in the testimony of the burnt out Experimenter (Anand Rajaram) or The Lecturer’s encounter with some mischievous children.
This grey world of nondescript urban streets outside buildings trying to duplicate the processes of the human mind proves strangely alluring, and Cockburn’s rhythms do just enough to keep you wondering at what he’s moving towards. Making use of Wright’s empathetic performance, You Are Here settles on The Archivist as its protagonist, and the finale is actually almost conclusive (if abruptly so). These unexpected alternate dimensions have more of a purpose than you might first think.
